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PostPosted: Thu Aug 21, 2003 7:42 pm 
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Not your daddy
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Joined: Mon Nov 18, 2002 2:18 am
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Location: Oregon State
Allright, the following guide will only give you the user knowledge of the tool Cartograph. Its a very simple program, but being simple, this does not mean there is very little work involved in generating your custom map to display on the T-maps, in game.. Anyways, heres what you do:

First of all, extract your Cartograph tool in the desired folder, that is not burried deep within your file system (you will understand why, shortly).
With that ready, and in a folder labled Cartograph, or what ever you wish, you will then need to open your MS Dos Prompt to operate it.

Fore Win 98 users
You can find a shortcut to this MS Dos prompt in your Start menu>programs.
For Win 2k, and newer, or NT users
Click Start menu> Run > and enter in the space.. open:cmd click ok

Now you have this up.. (actual stats will varry. )
Image

Next, you will need to change the directory path to the Cartograph folder, like so... (this is why it is best to keep the Cartograph folder not within many folders, in your computers)

Image

As you see.. If you are not familiar with useing MS Dos, start with the command CD this tells Dos you want to change folder/file paths. After CD, enter your new path, as shown..( C:\>CD program files\bla\bla)

Okay, next, You will need to dig into your Ultima Online folder, and find the image file called, MultiMap.rle. Its proble wise to copy it, and paste the copy into the Cartograph folder. You need it in the cartograph folder, to continue.
Now to begin the first phase of the transitioning of the Cartograph map. With the file path changed, and ready set on the Cartograph folder, enter the line here, as follows..
Cartograph.exe -decode multimap.rle map.bmp

You should have it looking like this:
Image

After you enter that, and hit Enter, If all was setup properly, you will see the text as shown here, as it runs..

Image

There are several ways you will get errors, but they all relate to user errors, unless you simply have recieved a corupted zip file, while downloading.. It can hapen. Double check your command
Cartograph.exe -decode multimap.rle map.bmp to see if all was spelled right. etc, etc..

Now in your cartography folder, you should have a new bmp file, called Map.bmp. This is the OSI map. One thing Cartograph will not do, is generate a map image from your Map0.mul file, so the hard work is just about to begin. Now you need to repaint a new map, that i similar to the OSI map you have just created. Yeah, exactly, another map to paint.

After playing around, I have come up with a way to somewhat start the process. Open InsideUO with your map showing, and right click>save

Choose "Map", uncheck the "Include statics" and check "Black Water"
save your map, as the bmp. Now, you need to play around with this in your Paint program. You must convert from a 16 million color image, to a 2 color image. But you should try to edit as much color as possible, before hand...

When you have somthing you are ready to test, simply open the MS Dos Prompt again, and enter the command,
cartograph.exe -encode multimap.rle map.bmp
you will get a new Multimap.rle from the map you converted. Replace the one in UO folder, and log in and have a look at a world map, made by thie Inscriptor, or cartographer.

That is all for now, hope this helps you guys get started. If anyone has a fool proof way to create a 2 color map of a custom map, that is fairly easy, please post here the examples. Good Luck!

--- Dian

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PostPosted: Thu Aug 21, 2003 10:53 pm 
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Continuing with the creation of the new map for you cartograph, there's a couple of things that you can use in Photoshop that may assist you.
Note, you can also use your source bmp for this process, and may actually turn out a little better.

First: Image -> Mode -> Grayscale
This will at least get you in the right direction on the color side.

Next: Filters
There's a ton of filters in Photoshop to help you get a decent "treasure map, but by far the most useful for me is:
Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges
This will effectively give your map a "hand-drawn" appearance very similar to the OSI map. You may have to play around with some of the details of the map, but this I think is the best filter for this.

Third: Use the selection tool (magic wand) with a tolerace around 40 or 50 and select the white areas of the map. Then paint over the enitre map with white to get rid of the off-white areas (the selection tool will "keep you in the lines"). Then Ctrl-Shift-I (Inverse selection) and change color to black and paint again over the whole map. This is about the quickest way to make it true black and white. Remember to use the pencil tool, and not the paintbrush tool.

Last, resize to what cartograph needs, and save. You can also just paste it into the bmp that cartographer generated.

Here's an example of a map I did some time ago:
ImageImage
On the left is the source bmp of the map. The right, after I did the above steps.

This, in a nutshell is how I made a cartograph map.
Hope that helps a bit.

-Ryandor


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PostPosted: Sun Sep 28, 2003 9:56 am 
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Young
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Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2003 9:49 am
Posts: 11
Thanks - thats working great - but I have still a problem.
When I make a local map for example or a townmap - how will it work that they show the correct position?

I'm using RunUO - do I have to change something in the scripts to make this work?

Thanks in advance!


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PostPosted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 3:59 pm 
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Newb
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Yeah this Work is graet.
Can you this for this steps with photoshop, a action createn.

Thanks for help, sorry my english is not so perfect


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PostPosted: Mon Nov 03, 2003 6:33 pm 
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Master of Dian
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Joined: Sat Jan 18, 2003 2:37 pm
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Location: Oregon
Image

Image

heres some completed pics I thought youd like to see.. Dian did a great job on the maps


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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2003 3:51 am 
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Not your daddy
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Location: Oregon State
awww, isnt she sweet 8)

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PostPosted: Wed Nov 05, 2003 8:21 pm 
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Master of Dian
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awwwwwwwww thanks Dian I love you too :P


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PostPosted: Wed Dec 10, 2003 3:31 pm 
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Young
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Joined: Mon Nov 17, 2003 2:22 am
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I have been completely unsuccessful in getting a good multimap.rle put together. I guess my map is too plain, or something, because I get huge expanses of monocolor for in-game maps.

Also, it seems the "zoom" on the maps are different for me than in your example (above). Your map captures a good deal of the penninsula wheras mine seems to be too focused on the area to tell where it is.

Dian, feel like expounding upon your example a little?


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 1:15 pm 
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After making the new map I was able to follow the instructions and got it to work! Thanks, but now my question is do the players need this new file? Im using RunUO.


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PostPosted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 6:06 pm 
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if they shall be able to see it(treasure searching, cartography etc.), they`ll need it. otherwise they do not really need it


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PostPosted: Sun Dec 14, 2003 3:20 am 
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Not your daddy
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Location: Oregon State
Indeed, same as you having to give them the map and statics files.. you will need to have them replace the multimap.rle as well :)
Nice job, btw. Feels good to get these things to actually work well, eh?

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PostPosted: Sun Jul 04, 2004 5:30 pm 
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Location: Grand Rapids, MI
I did exactly what was shown and changed the map a little bit but the multimap.rle is coming out to 394k and its only supposed to be 312k so it crashes your client when you try to look at tmap. I've tried taking parts away from the map and stuff but it stays the same size for some reason. I've checked the pixel sizes between the osi decoded version and mine and they are the same. What should I do? Maybe I should download another program that Cartography or?

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PostPosted: Sat Jul 31, 2004 3:18 am 
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As what kwandobe says above. i get my map.bmp to size of 640k and the dimensions are the exact same as the origional bmp that was created but when i encode back to the multimap.ple it is just a bit bigger and crashes the client when you double click the map in game. Fix? something we are both doing wrong? please help this is an awesome program and an awesome option i would like to use. Running POL fyi


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 18, 2004 11:10 am 
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Kwandobe find me i found out whats wrong with ours.

If anyone has a solution to the zooming of this please let me know Im attempting something right now but as i am a computer idiot. It may not work


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 3:39 pm 
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So after several attempts my map is shoddy and not very zoomed. It seems to be in the right area but off centered by maybe 3/4 of the screen or 1 full screen in any direction. Please can someone help me with this or maybe even be kind enough to do the process for me perrrty please lol


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PostPosted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 1:55 pm 
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Anyone who can not find where to download cartograph i am hosting on my computer right now heres the link.

ftp://24.147.205.228/cartograph.zip

I just used this guid today by Dian and Ryandor and they both very much still work and are excellent ways to do this. Stick this post!

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PostPosted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 2:13 pm 
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althought I am having a problem, i have the sizes set correctly to 2560x2048 and for some reason when i create a world map its off centered and theres a peice of the right side of the map missing. Anyone know why this is? I did as ryandor said and didnt include the dungeon area and not statics. hmm

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PostPosted: Sun Aug 27, 2006 11:55 pm 
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This is what my cartograph error looks like when i make a fullmap ingame:

Image

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